Alan Sokol of Hemisphere: “More Than A Channel: Why Hispanic Audiences Deserve Their Own Streaming Ecosystem”

The streaming industry is maturing – competition is intense, audiences are selective, and the increased ad inventory in the marketplace has resulted in reduced ad pricing. The platforms generating sustainable engagement are the ones that have moved beyond broad reach to something more valuable: audience ownership.

The highest-retention, highest-monetization audiences in streaming are not casual browsers. They are organized around specific content verticals where passion and emotional investment drives repeat behavior and sustained viewing. Serialized dramas — Turkish, Korean, Latin American — has demonstrated this at a global level. The business case is straightforward: loyal audiences watch more, return more, and convert more reliably against advertising and sponsorship revenue.

The U.S. Hispanic market is where that dynamic represents the clearest untapped opportunity. Streaming now drives 55.8% of total TV time for Hispanic viewers, compared to 46% for the rest of the U.S. 78% of Latino households use subscription streaming services, versus 63% of the general population. This is not a niche–more than 63 million Hispanics live in the U.S., commanding US$4.1 trillion in purchasing power. And yet less than 1% of digital ad spend from U.S. online retailers goes to Spanish-language websites in Q1 2025 (Nielsen + 3). The demand is there. The monetization infrastructure has not caught up.

That is the gap. And gaps at that scale, in high-engagement verticals, are where the most durable streaming businesses get built.

HMG is moving to capture it. Building on its FAST telenovela channel, the company is launching Todo Novelas, Más Pasiones, a dedicated global telenovela app and the first scaled destination for the most popular and acclaimed serialized drama from around the world, en español.

The model is free and ad-supported, combining live linear programming with a rich on-demand library: full-length telenovelas with complete seasons, serialized dramas, limited series, and short- form vertical micro-dramas. The content spans Latin American classics and new productions, Turkish dizis, Brazilian epic sagas, and K-dramas, a catalogue built to maximize time-on-platform across a highly engaged, under-monetized audience.

The library runs thousands of hours of premium content, organized into thematic collections by country, sub-genre, and theme. The curation strategy is deliberate: editorial organization drives discovery, discovery drives session depth, and session depth drives revenue.

That is the distinction. Todo Novelas, Más Pasiones is not a content channel. It is a vertically integrated audience platform.

The next phase of streaming will be defined by companies that identify underserved, high-loyalty audiences and build the infrastructure around them, not just to reach them, but to own them. Dedicated ecosystems generate stronger retention, deeper advertiser relationships, and more defensible competitive positioning than general platforms can replicate at the vertical level.

The telenovela audience is global, loyal, and significantly under-monetized. The market infrastructure to serve it at scale is only now being built.

The companies that move first will have a structural advantage that is very difficult to close.

By

Alan Sokol

President & CEO

Hemisphere Media Group

marketing@hemispheretv.com

hemispheretv.com